Django Hand On Fire

Django Reinhardt is a legend. But Django -which may have meant "He who wakens"- was twice born. A first time in the snow, during the winter of 1910 in a nomadic gypsy family stationed in Liberchies, Belgium. The second in Saint-Ouen, near Paris, in the fall of 1928, when a fire in his caravan mutilated his left hand. Writer Salva Rubio and artist Efa have already produced together a remarkable biopic on Monet, paying tribute to the painter's obsession with light. Likewise, this biopic devoted to the youth of the prodigy musician features the passion and determination of the man who has always considered himself the greatest guitarist in the world. In this story-score, by laying out the panels like chords, the artist brings to life his passion in vibrating watercolor to better accompany the musical and technical development of the inventor of gypsy jazz. From musette to jazz, from violin to banjo then to guitar, Django's destiny is that of his &‘hand on fire', possessed by the supernatural spirit of the "duende" which burns in the soul of each gypsy musician. That of a miracle who is reborn from his ashes, more dazzling than ever. Cue the music!

"Django: Hand on Fire" tells the story of the youth of Django Reinhardt, a Roma raised outside Paris who would go on to be one of the most influential guitarists of all time. We follow his early years as an aimless and rebellious kid who is heading for a life of trouble until his devoted younger brother Nin-Nin convinces their mother Négros to buy him a banjo. Captivated by its possibilities and spurred by his natural talent, Django becomes obsessed with the instrument and quickly surpasses his older peers, mastering the popular bal-musette and intrigued by the new jazz coming over from the States. Soon he is playing in clubs and winning awards. He is on the verge of international success at the age of 18 when a tragedy strikes that will mark the rest of his life and career: he is badly burned in a caravan fire and spends the next years relearning how to play the guitar with only two fully-functioning fingers. This is an amazing story of perseverance and of fierce family love that is little known even to many jazz aficionados.

Prince Rogers Nelson aka Prince was a complete artist, all at once author, composer, performer, multi-instrumentalist and producer. A real showman on stage, songs like “ 1999” or “ Purple Rain,” made him an international star. With his tormented life, sulfurous relationships, sex and drugs, he was above all a genius artist with a very distinctive original style who sold more than 80 million records around the world.Here is his extraordinary destiny in a mix of colorfully illustrated articles and comics!

One of the founders of the Impressionist movement while also one of its most ruthless critics, too bohemian for the bourgeois and too bourgeois for the artists, Edgar Degas was a man of paradoxes. A loner, he only loved one woman without ever courting her, the American painter Mary Cassatt whom we follow closely as well. And it is in the company of the latter that at the twilight of his life, Efa and Rubio open the pages of Degas's notebooks to try to unravel the mystery of this genius steeped in contradictions.

The music of Django Reinhardt is as important today as it has ever been. Blending jazz and gypsy influences, his exuberant solos and incisive rhythm playing have fascinated – and tantalized – guitarists for half a century. In this book, leading jazz writer Dave Gelly considers Django's life and recordings and explains exactly why he sounded the way he did. Meanwhile, guitarist and teacher Rod Fogg shows you how you can achieve that sound yourself, with the help of detailed transcriptions of six of Django's most celebrated and exciting numbers. Includes audio wth all six numbers accurately recorded from the transcriptions for you to follow along.

Django Reinhardt was perhaps the greatest guitarist to ever live. A Gypsy who made his jazz guitar speak with a human voice, he was dashing, charismatic, childish . . . and doomed to die young after creating a legacy of Gypsy Jazz that remains vibrant today. Gypsy Jazz is a music both joyous and sad, timeless and modern. It was born from a marriage of Louis Armstrong s trumpet with the anguished sound of Romany violin and the fire of flamenco guitar. Created amidst the glamour of Jazz Age Paris and reaching a peak during the horrors of World War II, Gypsy Jazz gave a voice to a dispossessed people. Today, Gypsy Jazz is more popular than ever. It has a legacy as strong as the Cuban sounds of the Buena Vista Social Club, the blues of B. B. King, or the R&B of Ray Charles. "Django Reinhardt and the Illustrated History of Gypsy Jazz" is a stylish collection of more than two hundred illustrations telling Django s story and the history of Gypsy jazz. Running through the Paris Jazz Age of the 1920s to the current worldwide renaissance of Gypsy jazz bands (including Django s grandsons, who are playing today), the images include rare archival photographs, modern images, posters, programs, tickets, guitars, memorabilia, paintings, and more. "

Dregni has penned the first major critical biography of Gypsy legend and guitar icon Django Reinhardt.

ReSounding Poverty: Romani Music and Development Aid engages with global scholarship on development, poverty, and applied research. It addresses the role of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) within postsocialist neoliberal processes and analyzes the economic structures within which Romani musics circulate. Specifically, ReSounding Poverty offers a micro ethnography of economic networks that impact the daily lives of Romani musicians on the borders of the former Soviet Union and the European Union. It argues that the development aid allotted to provide economic assistance to Romani communities, when analyzed from the perspective of the performance arts, continues to marginalize the poorest among them. Through their structure and programming, NGOs choose which segments of the population are the most vulnerable and in the greatest need of assistance. Drawing on ethnographic research in development contexts, ReSounding Poverty asks who speaks for whom within the Romani rights movement today. Framing the critique of development aid in musical terms, it engages with Romani marginalization and economic deprivation through a closer listening to vocal inflections, physical vocalizations of health and disease, and emotional affect. ReSounding Poverty brings us into the back rooms of saman, mud and straw brick, houses not visited by media reporters and politicians, amplifying the cultural expressions of the Romani poor, silenced in the business of development.